If Jack's in Love

by Stephen Wetta

  The world was hot that day, too bright, too hot, too harsh, and I could tell already that turning thirteen would offer no advantages. In fact, something told me things were only going to get tougher. There is a hum, an undertone just behind the noise of the world. I have never liked silence. Besides, there is no such thing as silence. If there were silence I would cherish it and hold it to my ear like a seashell….But maybe I wasn’t thinking along those lines when I was at the creek, probably I’m projecting backwards. But I did have intimations. I had been living in a cocoon and the cocoon was tearing and I was being thrust out against my will…and where would I go?

  I went home and lay on the bed with my pillow propped behind me.

  Stan woke in the afternoon. He didn’t answer when I spoke. I wasn’t his brother anymore.

  He threw on jeans and a T-shirt and left the house. The fan in the dining room window sucked air through the passageways. The bedroom door was open. I was alone, and whenever the oscillating fan atop the dresser turned it blew its breezy air upon me.

  THE NEXT MORNING Reedy’s patrol car cruised up. I heard the rumble of the engine. Stan was gone. Mom was at work. Pop was watching television.

  The bell rang and I ran to the living room. I stood beside Pop as he answered the door.

  Reedy regarded us gravely. He removed his hat, asked if he could come in. Pop stepped aside.

  The cop was glancing all around, peeking in the corners.

  He asked if Stan was home.

  “I believe he went out,” Pop said.

  “Got a bit of a problem at the Joyners’,” Reedy said. “Seems Gaylord has disappeared.”

  “Disappeared.”

  “Left the house two evenings ago, hasn’t been seen since. Said he was going to Dogwood Downs, meeting Bruce Pendleton. They were supposed to go to a movie but Gaylord didn’t show up. The movie started at eight, they were supposed to meet at seven-thirty. And then he didn’t come home that night and now no one knows where he is. People say it’s not like him to run off and they’re worried something bad might have happened.”

  Pop’s face darkened. Why would Reedy be coming to us? I was scrambling in my mind, trying to remember two evenings before.

  “We were at Neuman’s that night.”

  “You were at Neuman’s Ice Cream Parlor?” Reedy quickly grasped at the information. He almost seemed relieved. “Your brother was with you?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “No, that was three nights ago,” Pop said, “Tuesday night.”

  “Oh yeah, that was Tuesday.”

  “What about Wednesday evening? You were all here?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “We’re trying to find people who might have seen Gaylord. I’m going to all the houses around here, Mr. Witcher, I’m not singling you out.”

  “Well no, we didn’t see him. We don’t have much to do with the Joyners.”

  “Mrs. Witcher was here in the house? And Stan?”

  “Miss Witcher was here, but Stan was with his girlfriend.”

  “What time did he come home? You think there’s a chance he might have run into Gaylord?”

  “Maybe about ten. You can ask him when you see him. I doubt he run into Gaylord, though. He stays at the Taylors’ house most all the time these days.”

  “Wednesday night he came home at ten?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Reedy held his eyes on Pop.

  “Well, I’m going around the neighborhood and letting folks know. If you hear anything you get in touch with me, okay? Let me know.”

  “Yes sir, we’ll do that.”

  Reedy hesitated, about to ask me something, but I stared at the floor and he let it go.

  After he left Pop said, “I’ll be damned.”

  He watched through the window ’til the cruiser pulled away.

  He cut the TV off.

  “This ain’t good,” he said.

  “Pop,” I said.

  “If anything’s happened to that kid your brother will be first one they’ll pin it on.” He shook his head, thinking his thoughts.

  I formed an image in my mind of the shack on Baskin Road. I got ready to say something and thought better of it.

  Then I remembered Myra.

  Up to that moment everything had been all abstract, and now I could see her fading away. She was getting fainter and fainter, like a radio station when you’re driving out of town.

  “Myra will hate me forever if Stan did anything to Gaylord.”

  “Your brother didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Kid’s probably shacking up with some girl. He’ll come home, you’ll see.”

  “Pop,” I said.

  “Hell, when I was sixteen I took off and stayed three weeks. I remember Mama like to have a fit. I was in Asheville all that time, met a gal at a party in Hendersonville and she took me back to her place in Asheville. Older gal, you know.” Pop gazed out the window, savoring the bawdiness of his bygone years.

  “You told Reedy Stan came home at ten.”

  “So?”

  “He didn’t, he was out all night. He didn’t come in ’til daylight.”

  “No, he came home at ten. I was right here watching TV, I remember.”

  “Then he must have gone back out.”

  “Nuh-uh, he was here. He sat with your mom and me and watched TV.”

  “Pop, you’re getting your nights mixed up. I was awake when he got home. Anya’s car pulled up around six in the morning and dropped him off and he went in the bathroom and stayed awhile. I was awake, I know.”

  “No, he was here Wednesday night. He was watching TV with me and your mom.”

  I knew this wasn’t true and I was about to argue, but then Pop fixed me with an angry stare. “What’s the matter with you, you wanna get your brother in trouble? He was here Wednesday night, do you understand?”

  “He wasn’t here and you know it.”

  “You need to set your memory straight. If Stan gets in trouble’cause of you I’ll never forget it, you hear? And what about your mother, how you think she’ll feel if your brother gets in trouble?”

  “I don’t wanna get Stan in trouble. If he didn’t do anything there ain’t no reason to—”

  “This is not about what he did or didn’t do. We ain’t getting mixed up in it. Everybody knows your brother and Gaylord are enemies. Just the other day Deputy Dawg had to pull Stan off the kid with the whole neighborhood watching. You better believe if Gaylord’s got himself in trouble first thing they’ll do is point the finger at your brother. We don’t want ’em even suspecting he had anything to do with it. Pay attention to me. I’m a lot older than you and I know the law. All they want is to find someone they can pin it on. They just want it off the books.”

  “Well I can’t tell lies. If Reedy starts asking me questions he’ll know right away I’m lying.”

  “Let him think what he wants. But Stan was here that night, you hear? That’s what you tell him. He was home by ten.”

  Pop went in the kitchen. I heard him nervously opening drawers, looking into things.

  “What’s the number at the Taylors’?” he hollered.

  “Call information,” I hollered back.

  I went to my room. I wanted to see Myra. I wanted to show her I was on her side. Why did I have to belong to the enemy clan?

  I carefully wrote her a letter, pausing to choose my words.

  I heard Pop in the kitchen, on the phone.

  After a while Anya’s GTO pulled up. Stan came with her through the front door.

  I read the letter back to myself:

  Dear M,

  I am sorry to hear about Gaylord. If there is anything I can do let me know. I am sorry about my brother and how he treated your brother. I want you to know I am not like him. If you still want me to be your boyfriend I will be. I will be your friend if that is what you want. I hope everything turns out alright.

  Love,

  J

  I stuck it in an envelo
pe and slid it in my back pocket.

  When I came to the living room Pop and Stan and Anya were sitting there, grinning at me constrainedly.

  “There he is!”

  “Sit down, we’re having a party.”

  Pop gave me a crooked smile.

  They were passing a bowl of chips around.

  “He’s so cute!” Anya said.

  Her eyes were dark and joyless.

  I sat down and they faced me.

  26

  “HERE’S THE STORY,” ANYA SAID. “We were together Wednesday night, Stan was with me the whole time. We were up in my room listening to the Doors and we didn’t leave the house.”

  “Your parents were there, right?” Pop said.

  “Yeah, downstairs. They’ll verify we were at home.”

  They looked at me to see if I was getting the message. And then Pop changed the story. He told Anya she should lie. He said she should tell the cops Stan had left her house at ten.

  “That’s the time I told Deputy Dawg he came home,” he explained.

  Why were they training me what to say? I could smell the duplicity a mile away.

  I took off like a bolt for Gladstein’s, before they could shout at me to stop.

  It was almost closing time and he was roaming about the shop saying good night to his jewels. The prissy bell rang, the Yatzis yapped, and Gladstein turned to look. On the tip of his nose was a pair of narrow-framed glasses. I had never seen him in glasses; it didn’t register at first what was different.

  “Witcher! Where did you go the other day, you never came back.”

  I leaned against the counter to catch my breath.

  “I need you to take me somewhere in your car.”

  “Did you run here?”

  “Can you drive me to Baskin Road?”

  “I suppose I can….” Gladstein made a few puttering motions, took off his glasses, patted behind the counter.

  “I’ll only need a minute,” I said, “and after that you can drop me off wherever you want.”

  He didn’t ask any questions, which I thought was cool. He rounded up his dogs—they poured like water from the back room—and took me out to the parking lot. We got in the hot black Continental and he eased down the windows and turned on the air and after it started blowing cold he whirred the windows up again. He was able to operate everything from a panel on the driver’s side.

  “You have to tell me how to get to Baskin, I’ve never been west of the shopping center.”

  “Cross Karen and keep going on Matson. It’ll change to two lanes when we’re close to Baskin.”

  Behind me the dogs were panting against my neck. Gladstein set his glasses on the dashboard and put the car in gear.

  The Continental cruised across Karen and headed towards where the suburbs ended and the country began.

  These days the area off Matson is nearly teeming as China. Spanking-new houses made of high-tech clapboard shine through sparse trees and strip malls line the six-lane thoroughfare. Whenever you reach a rise in the road a steady line of headlights will be coming at you.

  Back then narrow streets wound off the main road past stately manses that had once belonged to aristocrats and gentleman farmers. I remember an old FFV, a retired judge named Parham, who lived in a house on Baskin that had been standing since before the Civil War. Some years back Pop had been hired by the judge to renovate one of the bathrooms, and he took me out there to hang around while he worked. I must have been eight, nine years old. The judge was sitting in a booklined parlor that might have come out of a Victorian novel. It was on the south side of the house, and there was a fireplace without a fire and a leather chair in which the judge sat perusing Dombey and Son. Pop was in the bathroom off the kitchen (the judge called it “the maid’s bath”) grunting and clanking his wrenches. I guess the judge took a shine to me, because he showed me a marvelous feature of the house. One of the shelves was phony. The books on it weren’t real, they were spines glued to the surface. The entire shelf was really a door with a secret latch that released it, and when it opened you saw a tiny bedroom, a bed, a table, and a pair of antique reading glasses on the table. Judge Parham told me the secret room had been constructed during the Civil War so his ancestors could hide from the Yankees.

  After that he took me behind the house and we wandered down to where some graves were. Off to the side, through the trees, stood the ruins of shacks where the slaves used to live. (The shack to which I’d intended to abduct Myra was one of them, about half a mile away.) All of the land around there, the woods and the fields and the houses, had once belonged to the Parham estate.

  Now, as Gladstein got near Myra’s shack, I asked him to pull to the side of the road. “I’m running up there to look at something, I’ll be right back.”

  “You got a dead body there?”

  I was holding the handle. Before I pushed open the door I said, “You shouldn’t joke like that, Mr. Gladstein.” Then I shouldered the door and ran around the rear of the car.

  Gladstein tapped his horn and signaled he was going to cruise up the road and turn around. I nodded and kept running.

  The shack was about two hundred feet off the road. Pop had shown it to me years before, after he’d invested in an easel and some paints so he could paint nature scenes. That hobby had lasted a year or so, long enough for him to paint the shack, once in winter and once in summer. There was a creek behind the shack, which he had included in his paintings, and one day when he was by himself he’d seen a UFO overhead, leaping and jerking across the sky. Several times he returned to the scene with Stan and me in tow, hoping we’d have a chance to see the thing too. I remember how excited and terrified I was. But we never did get to see it.

  Now I was running through the thistles and briars, approaching the rotting shack. The sun was going down but there was still plenty of light and the air remained hot and humid. The sinister song of the cicadas kept rising and ebbing through the trees. Things were biting my arms and my legs. Everything seemed weak, depraved. The sun was dying in the sky, sending down heat that parched hands and feet and turned small animal carcasses into briquettes of corruption and stench. The shack was lopsided, off-kilter. It was as though the earth had jolted and its axis made to tilt.

  The shack had no windows. There was only one way to see inside and that was through the door. When Pop and I explored it years before, we had found a pissy mildewed mattress on the floor, God knows who tossed it there. We could see it only because light was beaming through crevices in the walls. Next to it were torn-out pages from a girlie magazine.

  I peeked in the doorway. The sun’s angle was oblique and the interior of the shack was nearly pitch. I put a foot out and pressed on a board and something scurried away.

  My heart liked to leap in my mouth.

  I ran back to the road and arrived just as Gladstein’s Continental was pulling up. I hopped in. His dogs were scratching and pawing at my neck.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  I was trembling inside. It was like two hands had gripped a vital stem and were shaking it up and down. My lips were shivering, my fingers were jittery.

  Gladstein must have decided I was cold, because he reached over and tapped the vent in another direction to keep it from blowing on me. But I wasn’t cold. It was so hot it might have been high noon.

  And then I burst out crying.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Gladstein had been kind enough not to ask questions and now here I was bawling like a child. It must have been years of crying coming out; I couldn’t stop. In front of Pop and Stan you didn’t cry.

  “What happened? Did something just happen?” He twisted in his seat to stare at where I’d come from, expecting to see some culprit.

  “Nothing happened,” I said.

  He drove away. He grabbed a few tissues from the glove compartment and handed them over. “You in trouble, kid?”

  I wiped my nose. He turned onto Matson and headed towards
town. We cruised for a few miles without saying anything. After we came to the third traffic light I pulled myself together. Gladstein had turned the radio to the country-western station and a Buck Owens song was playing.

  “You like country music?” I said.

  “Nah, I’m just trying to assimilate.”

  The light turned green. We were coming up on the shopping center at the top of the hill.

  “Gaylord Joyner has disappeared,” I said.

  “Myra’s brother?”

  “He’s been gone two days. He was supposed to meet Bruce Pendleton at the movie house at Dogwood Downs on Wednesday night but he never showed up. No one knows where he is now.”

  Gladstein whistled. He thought about that. “Were you looking for him just now, is that what you were doing?”

  “If he got killed they’re gonna blame my brother for it.”

  Gladstein took the Continental past the shopping center. “Don’t be morbid, kids that age do all sorts of crazy things.”

  He turned into our neighborhood and dropped me in front of the house.

  Stan and Pop were on the porch, watching when I got out of the car.

  “No,” I said, “he’s dead.”

  27

  POP’S AND STAN’S WORRIED EYES followed me through the house. Stan kept trying to make conversation. He trailed me to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the bathroom.

  Mom, of course, was oblivious to it all. Her work wore her out. She had to stand on her feet all day, and when she came home she had to cook, clean. After that she’d hit the couch and the lights would go out. I mean her lights. Sometimes she snored.

  Pop was being friendly again. He came in the kitchen while I was fixing a sandwich, with Stan behind him.

  “Why are y’all following me everywhere?”

  “I was on my way in before you started. What were you doing with Mr. Gladstein just now?”

  “Nothing, I went to see him at the jewelry store and he gave me a ride home.”

  Pop shot a glance at my brother.

  “Man ain’t funny or nothing, is he?” he asked.